Abstract
Time-of-Flight (ToF) technologies are developed mainly for range estimations in industrial applications or consumer products. Recently, it was realized that ToF sensors could also be used for the detection of fluorescence and of the minute changes in the nanosecond-lived electronic states of fluorescent molecules. This capability can be exploited to report on the biochemical processes occurring within living organisms. ToF technologies, therefore, provide new opportunities in molecular and cell biology, diagnostics, and drug discovery. In this short communication, the convergence of the engineering and biomedical communities onto ToF technologies and its potential impact on basic, applied and translational sciences are discussed.
Highlights
Time-of-Flight (ToF) technologies are developed mainly for range estimations in industrial applications or consumer products
Successful that development was, one key element in allowing the biomedical community to benefit from fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) systems, to enable the screening technologies we were pioneering [1] and to get closer to the routine application of FLIM, was still missing: replacing the expensive, comparatively fragile, and not very user-friendly, multi-channel plates used in FLIM with better technologies
Ad hoc technologies for lock-in imaging appeared to be operating at Remote Sens. 2012, 4 modulation frequencies too low to be useful for FLIM [5,6] and the available CCD technologies required modifications to the camera electronics of systems which would not operate at an ideal frequency range for FLIM
Summary
It was the summer of 2005 when in the laboratory of Fred Wouters we started the first autonomous runs of our new in-house developed high throughput fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) system. Successful that development was, one key element in allowing the biomedical community to benefit from FLIM systems, to enable the screening technologies we were pioneering [1] and to get closer to the routine application of FLIM, was still missing: replacing the expensive, comparatively fragile, and not very user-friendly, multi-channel plates used in FLIM with better technologies. Frequent searches of primary literature returned only a few, though interesting, papers including: Nishikata et al [2] on the development of a dedicated lock-in imager in CCD technology and, Mitchell et al [3,4] on the adaptation of conventional CCD cameras to achieve demodulation. Time-of-Flight (ToF) based technologies developed for other scopes: solid-state smart pixels were developed to replace multi channel plate- or LiDAR-based technologies to quantify the distance of objects by measuring the travelling time of a pulse of light from and to the detector/light-source. It is apparent that the engineering and biomedical communities may benefit from each other, and we are seeding new technologies and applications that could have significant impact on basic sciences and health care in the medium term
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